“Ye-e-e wow!” Dick Maxwell, fighting sleepily to get his arms free from the tightly rolled blanket, yawned cavernously. Then: “Whoosh!—Larry, old scout!—wake up!”
The blanket roll in the other bunk stirred like a chrysalis about to burst and let loose whatever sort of bug it contained. Then a curly red head appeared, followed by a pair of stretching arms.
Dick sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.
“Say, Larry; what do you know about this!” he exclaimed, staring at the face of his wrist watch. “By the great horn spoon—it’s five o’clock! five o’clock in the afternoon!”
It was the day after the day of trampings, and old mother Nature had been taking her toll with a vengeance for the drafts made on her in the long hike to and through and around and beyond the valley with a doggish name. Straight through from a little past midnight the two hikers had slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted, and even now they both felt that they could stand still more of it.
“Ah-yah!” gaped Larry, matching Dick’s yawn. “Say, Dickie; somebody must have put us to bed last night. I sure don’t recollect doing any of it myself.”
“If anybody should be interested enough to ask, I’ll say that was some tramp we had yesterday; s-o-m-e tramp!” Dick put in.
“Uh-huh,” Larry agreed. “You’re talking in mouthfuls. Wonder if the news we brought did any good?”
“Here’s hoping. But everything seems mighty quiet around here now—if we’re supposed to be doing any hustling. I don’t even hear the compressor running.”
After they crawled into their clothes and turned out, the quietness of the camp was fully explained. First, they saw that the work in the big rock cutting just above the camp had apparently been abandoned—as it was, temporarily—and a track passage around the obstacle had been obtained by means of a hastily built wooden trestle standing, as the Overland Central trestle did at the point of that road’s entrance into the canyon, with its bents in the river bed.
Over this trestle the track had already been laid; and while they were staring at the miracle of accomplishment which had been wrought in less than a double circuit of the clock-hands, the 717, with Brannigan at the throttle, came storming up the canyon, pushing two flat-cars loaded high with cross-ties—pushing them right along, too, for there was time only for a hand wave from the little Irishman before the two-car train shrilled around the curving trestle and disappeared to sight and sound.
“Hooray!” cried Dick, swinging his cap; “that means that we’re still in the ring and going strong! Let’s get a bite to eat and then go on ahead and report for duty.”
Luckily for them there was a cook left at the nearly deserted hard-rock camp, and the “bite” to which they presently sat down transformed itself into a hearty meal, as it had need to be, since it took the place of the skipped supper of the night before, and the breakfast and dinner of the day through which they had slept.
This very necessary preliminary attended to, they set out to follow the lately laid track up the canyon. At every step they marveled. There had been a great deal of hurry work done during the summer on the race up the Tourmaline, but nothing to equal this drive which had gone on while they slept. “Miraculous” was the only word that fitted. In the short time that had elapsed the track had been carried around the canyon obstacles and up to and into Yellow Dog Park, and the rush—judging from the number of material trains that passed them as they hurried forward—was still on.
Among the sandstone hills in the circular valley they came upon the building army, augmented now by every available man on the large construction force. In the thick of the work turmoil the boys found their chief.
“Glad to see you fellows,” said the driver of men briskly. “Did you have your sleep out?”
“We sure did,” Dick grinned.
“All right; we’re calling it a battle, and I’ll make you two my orderlies. Dick, you may run up ahead and see how the supply of cross-ties is holding out. Report to Goldrick if it’s running short. Larry, you chase around until you find Smith, the wire chief, and tell him we’ve got to have those arc-lights in commission within an hour. Then find Lonergan and see if his carbide flares are ready to be distributed. Skip for it—both of you!”
That was the introduction to a night’s work that both Dick and Larry thought they should never live long enough to forget. Almost as if by magic, it seemed, electric wires were strung, and with the coming of darkness, arc-lights and carbide flares blazed out all along the line. Under an illumination that was little short of daylight the gangs of track-layers, working now at the close of a twenty-four-hour shift in relays of two hours on and one hour off for rest, sprang to their task. Like clock-work the material trains came up from the supply camps below, cross-ties and rails, spikes and fish-plates, bolts and nuts were distributed, and the incessant clanging of the spike mauls was like the din of a busy blacksmith shop.
It was during this night of tremendous toil—the second night for the men who were driving the job—that a track-laying record was broken for that entire section of the West. Fortunately, the ground between the sandstone buttes was comparatively level and but little grading was needed. But for that matter, the “leveling” could be done later by reworking crews. The need of the moment was for speed; for the construction of a usable track of some sort—any sort; and under the combined efforts of a master mind and many tireless and skilful hands the usable track was materializing by leaps and bounds.
“I’m telling you, Larry, that this is one something to stick down in your little old note-book!” Dick exclaimed enthusiastically, in one of the few breathing spells their work of order-carrying permitted. “I wouldn’t have missed seeing this night’s work, and being a part of it, for anything under the sun.”
“Here too,” Larry agreed. “It’s great! And doesn’t the chief stand out like the biggest man you ever saw? My heavens, Dick—if I thought I could ever grow a brain big enough to handle a job like this——”
“Of course you can—and will!” Dick asserted, with comradely loyalty. Then to a grimy-faced lad, one of the spike distributors, who came running up: “Right-o: what is it now, Jimmie Dowling?”
“The big boss does want to be seeing you both,” was the spike boy’s message; and Dick and Larry hurried down the line to the temporary field headquarters where the chief was sitting on a spike keg, with a couple of planks on trestles for a work table.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you fellows since this drive began,” was the greeting they got. “Pull up a couple of those empty kegs and sit down. Now that we have a few minutes I want you to tell me all about that scouting expedition you made yesterday. Give me the details.”
Dick did the telling, or most of it, boiling the report down into the fewest possible words to save the chief’s time.
“A thoroughly good, workmanlike job,” was the hearty commendation to follow Dick’s narrative; and then, with the shadow of a smile lurking in the sober gray eyes: “We won’t say anything about the fellow named Jones. There was really no good reason why you should have suspected him or doubted his story. Now then, a few more particulars about that O. C. supply camp you found at the head of the valley; about what amount of material have they on hand at that point?”
It was Larry who answered this question, and he fished out his note-book and showed the sketch he had made of the camp and the route of the O. C. across the valley. Much of his work during the summer had been the checking of material, and he was able to form a reasonably good estimate of how much track a given quantity of cross-ties and rails would lay.
“I’d say they have, maybe, two miles of ties and rails piled up in that camp,” was his venture at the quantities.
“Not more than that?”
“No, sir; I think not.”
“That is good news; better than I expected to hear. If we can make the crossing and get ahead of them in the upper canyon, we’ll beat them yet. Now about that rock cutting you say they’re working in above their camp; how big is it?”
Again it was Larry who answered.
“It’s a heavy cutting; twelve or fourteen feet deep on the high side, I should say, and considerably over a hundred feet long. We couldn’t get near enough to make an estimate in cubic yards; but I’d say they have a week’s work there, at the very least.”
“Better yet,” said the chief. “In a week’s time we ought to be leaving them well behind.”
“But when we come to their track here in this valley, they’ll block the crossing for us, won’t they?” Dick asked.
“No doubt they will try to. Whether they will succeed or not is another matter. Now I want you two to do another little scouting stunt. Follow our line up the valley and post yourselves somewhere near the O. C. track. Stay there for the remainder of the night and be prepared to report on what you’ve seen.”
Reluctant as they were to miss any part of the joyous work battle, the two “scouts” obeyed the new order cheerfully, trudging out ahead of the track-layers and soon leaving the most advanced guard of the workers behind. It was a clear night, or rather early morning, with the stars shining brightly to show the ghostly shadows of the surrounding mountains rising like the sides of a great bowl to enclose the shut-in valley. A few turns among the hills served to efface even the sounds of the work battle, and the wilderness stillness, after the clamor and din, was almost deafening.
“What do you reckon the chief wants us to find out, particularly?” Dick asked as they plodded along.
“Everything that goes on, I guess,” Larry answered. “The O. C. people know that we’re coming; they’ve found it out long before this time; and they’ll be rushing material out ahead as fast as they can. Because, you see, if they block the track for us, they’ll have to block it for themselves, as well.”
That was a good guess, for, even as he made it, they heard the rattle of a train, and by sprinting a bit they reached the crossing point in time to see it go thundering past. There were three flat-cars loaded with ties ahead of the pushing engine, and by the light of Dick’s pocket flashlamp Larry noted the fact in his memorandum book—the fact and the time.
Beyond this they had little to do save to record the passing of an occasional train; loaded ones going to the front, and empties returning. In the idle intervals they had a chance to study the lay of the land at the point where the clash, if there should be one, would occur. The crossing place was in a small level flat surrounded by the sandstone hills. As nearly as they could determine, the crossing would be practically at right angles; the O. C. track running nearly north and south and the Short Line east and west. From studying the lay-out they began to speculate as to how the crossing would be made; whether the O. C. rails would have to be sawn in two, or a regular set of crossing-frogs put in.
“Frogs, I’d say,” asserted Larry, who was the mechanical end of the partnership. “It would take too long to saw the rails; and the other way all we’d need to do would be to build the frogs to fit a gap in their line, take up two of their rails, and drop the made-up crossing into place. That wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, if we were all ready for it beforehand.”
At the first peep of dawn the noises of the work battle began to be audible again; and shortly after that the tie-distributing teams made their appearance. The two boys got up and stretched themselves. It had been quite an hour or more since a train had passed on the other line, and as yet there were no signs of a coming attempt to block the way for the up-coming force.
“Gee!” said Dick, shivering in the morning chill, but more from his excitement, “here we come shoving along—and the way is still clear. Do you reckon those fellows are going to miss the chance of blocking us, after all?”
Before Larry could reply, the answer to the question came lumbering out of the southward hills; and it promptly extinguished the implied hope. A three-car train of steel rails was backing slowly down the Overland Central track and in the half light of the dawn the boys could see that there were men on each of the cars; quite a number of them.
Since it was a loaded train coming in the wrong direction for loaded trains, there was no doubt as to its destination and purpose. Evidently the “enemy” had had scouts out, too, and knew to the exact moment when the time had arrived for the obstacle placing.
Dick and Larry held their post of observation, which was behind a sandstone boulder, until the train rumbled down into position. Instead of stopping on the crossing point, however, it ran a little way past, stopped, reversed, and ran up again repeating this pendulum movement slowly and deliberately in such a fashion as to keep the crossing place covered for a greater part of the time with a moving train.
“I don’t see any particular use in that,” Dick said, after the pendulum swing had been duly established. “Why don’t they stop it squarely in front of us?”
“Fixes us so we can’t do anything at all while they keep moving—can’t hit a lick,” Larry grunted. “Besides, they can cover more ground that way; stops us from trying to build around in either direction. Let’s go find Mr. Ackerman and make our report. There isn’t going to be anything more doing here until we get up with our track.”
Accordingly, they walked down the grade until they found the chief. After they made their report of the number of trains that had passed during their watch they were told to go and get breakfast.
With the morning meal out of the way they hurried back to the front. In the short space of time they had been absent the scene at the crossing had changed decidedly. The Short Line track had been carried up to within a few feet of the opposition right-of-way, and teams were already going around the pendulum-swinging train with loads of cross-ties. But by far the largest part of the building army was halted. Around a dozen camp-fires the track-layers were eating breakfast and drinking hot coffee which the cooks were bringing up in huge tin cans.
“Looks plenty peaceful, so far,” Larry remarked. “Wonder what we’ll try to do?—rush ’em?”
Dick shook his head—rather regretfully, it must be admitted.
“Nope; Mr. Ackerman isn’t built that way. You haven’t been with him all summer without finding that out, have you? But we could do it, hands down, if he’d only give the word. There are only twenty-seven men on that blocking train, counting the engineer and fireman, and we outnumber them at least a dozen to one.”
“What do you mean by rushing them? Take the train away from ’em and run it off to one side?” Larry queried. “That would be as easy as rolling off a log.”
“Oh, yes; easy enough. But you’ll see; Mr. Ackerman won’t do it. Naturally, in a scrap of that kind, somebody’d be bound to get hurt, and the chief won’t stand for that.”
That was all right; but short of the “rushing” there didn’t seem to be anything to be done. So long as the moving train was see-sawing back and forth over the point where the crossing-frog, already made up and bolted together and lying in readiness beside the track, must be put in, nothing but a forcible clearing away of the obstruction seemed to promise any degree of success.
Larry looked across at the moving obstacle and scowled.
“I’d rush it in a minute, if I were in the chief’s place!” he gritted. “They’ve got no right, legal or any other kind, to hold us up this way; they’re just outlaws! Every man we’ve got on the job would jump to get in on the fight, if Mr. Ackerman would only turn his back and shut his eyes for a minute or two.”
That was Larry, mind you; the fellow who usually thought twice before he acted once, and who was, generally speaking, as mild-mannered and peaceable as big-muscled fellows commonly are. Perhaps it was an outburst of that fighting temper he had once spoken of to Dick; the temper that would still, under sufficient provocation, come boiling up out of that pit of bitterness he had tried to describe.
“Would you?” said Dick; then, a bit thoughtfully: “Perhaps I should, too. And yet ... maybe Mr. Ackerman’s right, at that, Larry. When you come right down to it, this whole railroad scramble isn’t worth the life of one single man of ours—or of theirs. Some of those fellows on the steel cars are armed; you can bet on that; and——”
He broke off because just then another act in the drama was getting ready to stage itself. Down the line of the Overland Central a light engine was coursing swiftly, and for a moment it seemed as if it must collide with the blocking train. But it came to a stand a little way short of the pendulum swing, and from the engine step a big man in soiled brown duck and laced leggings swung off and came on foot down the track side.
“Look who’s here!” Dick muttered morosely—“Grissby—the O. C. chief. You’d say he has a nerve, wouldn’t you?—to come walking in here on us at a time like this!”
“I’ll say so!” growled Larry; and as they were turning away the big, bearded intruder came up, smiling grimly.
“Hello, boys,” he said, “where’s your boss?”
Before they could reply their own chief came across from one of the breakfast fires.
“How are you, Ackerman?” was the newcomer’s greeting. “Thought I’d run down and congratulate you on the fine piece of work you’ve been doing in these last two days. You’ve broken all the track-laying records in this neck of woods. But, as you see, it doesn’t do you any good.”
The Short Line chief shook his head, matching the grin of triumph with a quiet smile.
“You can’t block this crossing indefinitely, Grissby, and you know it,” he returned, and the two boys stood aside, listening with all their ears. “This is our right-of-way, located and filed upon long before your people ever thought of building to Little Ophir, and we can prove it in court. As you probably know, injunction proceedings have already been begun. You’ll have to move out when a United States court officer comes up here with the judge’s order.”
“You are forgetting ‘the law’s inevitable delays’,” the visitor put in, in genial mockery. “Long before your court order gets here we’ll be laying track into Little Ophir.”
“Not with the amount of building material you have up ahead of this blockade of yours—and which you can’t add to so long as you are obstructing your own track,” was the smiling retort. Then: “I’ll be obliged to you, Grissby, if you’ll turn Blaisdell, my instrumentman, and his helper loose. I’m taking it for granted that you’ve got them locked up somewhere.”
The “enemy” chief laughed.
“It’s already done. Your two men will rejoin you shortly. Sorry to have inconvenienced you, but we couldn’t well let them go back to you to carry the news of our bit of strategy. Here’s hoping you’ll have a pleasant wait for your court officer. So long.” And he walked back along the track, mounted his engine and was trundled away.
A short time after this visit of Grissby’s there was a warm little conference held in Mr. Ackerman’s office tent. Every member of the engineering staff, including Larry and Dick, was present, and the younger men, led by the first assistant, Goldrick, were unanimously and enthusiastically in favor of “rushing” the blockading train; overwhelming its crew by sheer force of numbers and ditching the train to get it out of the way.
“They are simply trading upon your well-known objections to the use of the strong arm, Chief,” was the way Goldrick put it. “There are only twenty-seven men, all told, on that blocking train, and we can put them out of business in just about as many seconds, if you’ll say the word. Those buckies on our track force are ripe for a scrap and they’ll go in with a laugh.”
“No,” the chief objected soberly. “As I’ve said many times before, we can’t afford to take the law into our own hands in a resort to violence. If we can outwit them in any way that won’t involve a hand-to-hand battle, we’ll do it. But I haven’t yet heard any of you suggest the means.”
It was at this point in the argument that Dick nudged Larry.
“Speak up and tell him!” he urged.
The ex-machine-shop apprentice turned red in the face, swallowed hard once or twice, and spoke in a sort of husky whisper that sounded to him like the loudest possible shout.
“You mean if we could get that train out of the way without a fight, it would—it would be all right, Mr. Ackerman?” he stammered.
“What’s that, Larry?” said the chief.
Larry repeated his question; adding: “I was just thinking——”
“All right; go on. We’re listening.”
“It’s—it’s just something Dick and I were talking about after Mr. Grissby went away. We were looking at that blocking engine as it came along, and the engineer leaned out of his cab window and asked us if we didn’t want to climb up and take a ride on a real railroad—just joshing us, I guess.”
“Well?”
“If you’d let us—or me ... it’s this way, you see. Part of the time he stops on the crossing, but mostly he lets the train drift on a little way past it before he reverses. If we could do something to make him run a little farther out of the way each time, and then something should happen to his engine so he couldn’t reverse——”
“We’re still listening,” said Chief Ackerman; and they were, all of them, by this time.
Naturally, this urging to go on made the inventor of schemes more embarrassed than ever. But he had gone too far now to back out.
“I was just thinking: if Dick and I should loaf around out here by the crossing, and that engineer should josh us again and ask us to ride——”
“You’d accept the invitation,” Goldrick cut in. “What then?”
“Then, after a little while—so it wouldn’t look too much like a put-up job, you know—if our track-layers should sort of suddenly get busy and make out as if they were going to change our line and make the crossing a few hundred yards farther down the O. C. track....”
“By George!” exclaimed Jones, Goldrick’s alternate on the rock-bossing; “that’s an idea, Mr. Ackerman!—to keep that blocking train dodging between two possible crossings.”
The chief nodded.
“Yes; one of the Donovan brand of ideas,” he said half musingly. “The principal question is, Larry, will your part of it work? Can you do what you have in mind without getting a broken head for yourself or Dick?”
“Yes, sir; I think so: I’m almost sure it can be done.”
The sober-eyed man who had to carry all the responsibility considered for a moment. Then he said:
“All right; go to it. I’m not asking you what you mean to do; I don’t care particularly to know—officially. But hold up a minute; I shouldn’t think it would need two of you on that engine. You’d better stay here with us, Dick.”
Dick looked up quickly.
“Is that an order, Mr. Ackerman?”
“N-no; not exactly. It is merely a bit of good advice.”
“If it isn’t an order, I’ll go with Larry. The job may need somebody to do the talking act, and that’s a long ways my best hold.”
When the conference adjourned some few things were done to lull suspicion on the part of the blockading force—if there were any suspicions to be lulled. Three of the Short Line gangs were set at work straightening and leveling the track so hastily put down in the night; but most of the men were told to take it easy, which they did, sitting around the dying breakfast fires and idling as though they had been given orders to rest until the messenger from the Brewster court should come on the scene with the majesty of the law in his pocket.
Meanwhile Larry and Dick strolled up to the crossing as a couple of fellows with less than nothing to do and sat down on a pile of cross-ties within a few feet of the O. C. track. Every time the blocking train jingled past in its slow, back-and-forth sentry beat the O. C. engineer, a big, stubbly-bearded man who looked, as Dick said, like a twinkly-eyed bandit, leaned out of his cab window and had something to say to them. Each time Dick grinned up at him and handed back joke for joke; but at such moments Larry appeared to be studying the under parts of the locomotive—especially those directly under the cab floor, or foot-plate.
“It’s exactly as I hoped it would be,” he said in low tones to Dick, after the train had passed for the third time; “just a plain, ordinary stop-cock, the same as we have on our engines. Opens with a rod running up through the foot-plate, like one of the water hydrants on your lawn—you know; you pull on the rod and she opens. If it’s opened with a quick, hard jerk, the crank handle will most likely pull past the center, and if it does, it can’t be shut off unless somebody crawls down under her. And nobody’s going to do that while she’s in action, believe me!”
“Um,” Dick grunted; “strikes me it’s sort of lucky that you had to earn your way through school by working nights on engines in the Brewster shops—lucky for the Short Line, I mean. I wouldn’t have found out all that if I’d sat here studying her for a week.”
“Say; you two kids look mighty lonesome—hangin’ ’round here with nothin’ stirrin’,” joked the burly engineer at his next time of passing. “Why don’t you swing up and be sociable and tell us what you-all’re aimin’ to do?”
“You’d better be careful about taking us on,” laughed Dick, as they climbed to the cab in response to the repeated invitation. “We’ll do you up if we can, you know.”
“Ho! ho!” chuckled the giant on the driver’s seat. “I reckon we can take a li’l’ chance on that. What are you, anyway?—water boys for that big gang of yours?”
“Well, you might call us that,” said Dick pleasantly. “In some ways you might almost call us water specialists: we use a lot of it, anyhow; some hot and some cold.”
Larry took no part in the joking talk. His gaze was fixed upon a ring in the iron floor of the cab; a loose ring that was threaded through an eye in the end of an iron rod that came up through a hole in the floor; rod and ring jingling musically as the engine went bumping over the rail joints.
Twice the slow back-and-forth journey had been made, and still Dick was industriously exchanging mild chaffings with the “twinkly-eyed bandit” on the driver’s box. Then suddenly the fireman broke in.
“Lookout, Bill!” he shouted to the engineer, “they’re gettin’ ready to rush us!”
The alarm was not entirely unwarranted. Between two minutes there had been a swift remobilization of the Short Line track-laying forces, followed by a quick resumption of the strenuous activities of the night.
Instantly the big engineman’s free hand shot out to grab Dick’s collar and he dropped the joking mood like a cast-off garment.
“Now you know why I tolled you up here with us!” he growled menacingly. “I happen to know who you are, kid; you’re the Short Line general manager’s son, and if that gang over there tries to pull any of the rough stuff on us, you’ll get it in the neck, and get it first—savvy?”
Being totally unexpected, it was the sharpest trial that had ever come to Dickie Maxwell; but he met it like a man—and with a laugh.
“I’m not hiding behind my father—not so that you could notice it,” he retorted cheerfully. “And, if you like, I can tell you what our men are getting ready to do. They are going to give you two crossings to watch instead of one.”
That was what developed in almost less than no time at all. As if every move had been planned in advance—as it actually had—the Short Line army began to throw down a track in a wide curve to come at a crossing some four or five hundred yards below the original survey. When this object made itself understandable, someone in authority on one of the steel cars of the blockading train yelled out an order, and the big engineer promptly lengthened his pendulum swing run to make it include the new location as well as the old, at the same time quickening the speed a bit.
On the second run down the line toward the new point of hazard, Larry shot a quick side glance at Dick, giving the eye signal that they had agreed upon. The engineer was now busy with his throttle and brake, and since he could hardly do three things at once, he apparently failed to notice that Dick was edging his way slowly toward the right-hand engine gangway.
The climax came as the locomotive was lumbering past the busy army of workmen laying its double line of steel down to the ostensible new crossing; the fortunate moment when the engineer, who had given his train a trifle too much headway, was jamming the throttle shut and twitching at the brake-handle to make a stop.
Quietly, and so quickly that he could hardly be missed, Dick swung out of the gangway and dropped to the ground; and at the same instant Larry stooped, thrust two fingers through the jingling ring on the cab floor and gave a mighty upward jerk. A second later, under cover of the thunder-bellowing, deafening roar that the jerk had set off under the engine, he leaped from the gangway and was immediately swallowed up and lost in the thronging crowd of Short Line workmen who surrounded him and rushed him to the rear with yells of triumph.
For a few tumultuous moments confusion worse confounded wrought its own sweet will in the ranks of the “enemy.” Larry’s simple plan, so successfully carried out, had been to “kill” the blockading engine at the point farthest removed from the real crossing, and his careful study of the under parts of the locomotive had been to determine the all-important fact that the blow-off cock of the boiler, situated directly under the cab, could not be closed from the cab if it were once opened wide.
This was the clever expedient for a bloodless getting rid of the lawless obstruction, and it worked like a charm. With the engine boiler losing its water as fast as a hundred-and-sixty-pound steam pressure could blow it out, it was only a matter of seconds before the engine was completely out of commission. Inside of a minute the twinkly-eyed bandit and his fireman were frantically dumping the fire to save the boiler from burning its crown-sheet; the blocking train was safely and permanently “stalled” out of the way; and the Short Line track-layers, abandoning the new crossing site as one man, were hurling themselves with a mighty shout of “Gangway!” upon the job of installing the already prepared crossing-frogs before the crew of the stalled train, now hot-footing it up the track, could reach the O. C. camp and bring reënforcements.
It was in the evening of this same day, a day in which another goodly stride ahead had been marked down to the credit of the Short Line extension, that one of the material trains forging to the newest front carried a freight caboose as a trailer. In the caboose, which was serving for the moment as the private car of General Manager Maxwell, the chief of construction, riding the new line with his ranking officer, told the story of the brief but brilliant crossing fight—which was no fight at all.
“Blew the water out of their engine, did he?” laughed the general manager, when the story was told. “Being Dick’s father, I suppose I shouldn’t have let him go with young Donovan on any such hare-brained adventure if I had been on the ground; but it is all right: I should be sorry if he had taken your offer to stay behind. And perhaps, as you say, his loose tongue was needed to keep those enginemen from thinking too pointedly about other things. Dick could talk himself out of jail if he were given a fair chance: it’s the thing he does best. Where are the boys now?”
“I’ve sent them ahead with a small gang of axmen to clear the right-of-way. We’re in timber for a couple of miles up there.”
“You mean they’ve gone along to help?”
The chief of construction smiled.
“Not exactly as helpers. Those two boys have been doing fine work up here all summer, Mr. Maxwell, as you know. Being boys, they’ve had time to think up a number of schemes that have helped us out wonderfully in this race against time; and this notion of the way in which the O. C. blockade could be broken this morning rather capped the climax. When I asked the boys what sort of a reward they’d like to have, they both begged for the same thing: to be put in charge of a small gang to do something on their own initiative.”
“Humph! So you’ve made them bosses, have you? You’re not spoiling them, are you? They’re only children, as you might say, both of them, as yet.”
“I know; in some ways they are just boys; fine, straightforward, American boys, equally ready for a fight or a frolic. But in other ways they have matured wonderfully in this summer of hard work. And this bit of bossing ambition is perfectly natural. They both know that if they are to grow, they must learn how to handle workmen. I thought you wouldn’t care if I should give them a little chance along that line. They’ve earned it.”
“All right,” said the general manager crisply; “but don’t push them too fast for their own good; that’s all. Dick is a bit rattle-brained; but I don’t know so much about young Donovan.”
“Donovan is making good,” said the chief engineer warmly; “all kinds of good. The only fault I can find with him at all is the fact that he has brought over a good lump of class consciousness with him from his shop experience. But there is some hope that he may outgrow that.”
But just how much Larry had improved the chance given him at the beginning of the summer by the stocky little gentleman sitting in the ill-lighted caboose with his chief engineer no one was to know until a day two weeks later—
But of that, again, more in its proper place.